Torture: Biblical Law Says “No” But Greco-Roman Law Says “Yes”
Posted on March 18th, 2010 in Articles
On several occasions over the years I have asked various individuals within the legal system, including judges, from where have we learned the basic God granted right not to incriminate one’s self. Until this week I had not been given an answer but a scholar by the name of Rousas J. Rushdoony did answer in an article on “Justice and Torture” which is published in his book, The Roots of Reconstruction. Because his explanation is much better than I could ever do I will simply quote a large portion of his article.
Rushdoony writes, “How remarkable it is that men choose to despise God’s law and idolize or a least idealize Greek and Roman law. The Greeks used torture regularly and their methods of capital punishment included crucifixion, beheading, poison, clubbing the person to death, burial alive, stoning, hurling a man from a precipice, and more. The Romans eliminated poisoning and strangling but used torture, and they refined crucifixion.
“Early Christendom more or less followed Biblical law, and the results were good. The two revivals of torture took place in the 13th century, with its effects lasting to the 19th, and again in the 20th century on a most formidable scale. It is worthy of note that in 865 A.D. Pope Nicholas I, in a letter to the Bulgars, forbad the use of torture, because confessions are not to be extracted by coercion and are forbidden as a result.
“When scholars began to study Roman law, and, later, Aristotle, Greco-Roman norms began to replace Biblical ones. Whereas Biblical law required evidence, not confession, now, as Edward Peters noted in Torture (1985), “Confession ascended to the top of the hierarchy of proofs” and remained there (p. 44). The consequences were devastating. First, it simplified the work of law enforcement. The needed “evidence” was extracted by torture from the suspect. There was an analogy, Peters noted, to plea bargaining. Most suspects in plea bargaining cases are guilty; the work of the police and the court is simplified by having the suspect plead guilty to a lesser offense. Torture also simplified the legal process; a majority of the suspects may have been guilty, but , as for the rest, well, human justice could not be perfect.
“Second, in Greco-Roman thought, politics of the state, as Aristotle so plainly outlined it, is the source of morality, not a religion. Such a faith shifts the whole center of the moral universe from God’s word to the state’s word. With the revival of Greco-Roman thought, the shift began in Europe from the centrality of the faith and the church to politics and the state. We are now reaping the consequences of that shift in our operative paganism.
“Third, as a result of this shift, the rational modern state and its philosopher kings or elite became the great defenders of man. Reason, progress, and man’s hope were now defined in terms of the state. The state was seen as man’s savior from the evils and superstitions of Christianity and the church. To suspect the state was for the philosophers of the state like suspecting God. They held plainly that right is what the state does. Marxism holds to the infallibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Mussolini said, of the fascist state, “Beyond the state, nothing that is human or spiritual has any value whatsoever.” In Nazi Germany, justice became racial: “The People’s sound sense of justice” governed; “Law is what serves the German people. Injustice is what injures it.” Some of the worst statements came from English idealist philosophers, Bosanquet, Green, and others, who identified the state with Right, after Hegel.
“We have thus had a major revival of torture in our time, and the greatest mass murders as well. A higher percentage of mankind has been killed in the 20th century than ever before by mass murders, death camps, man-made famines, war, revolution, torture, and so on. The end is not yet.
“So routine has man’s torture of man become that in Marxism and fascism the medical profession has been routinely used in sophisticated modern forms of torture. It has taken much of this [20th] century to bring Western psychiatrists even to the point of considering the condemnation of Soviet psychiatric tortures.
“This should not surprise us. As Western medical practice has departed from Christianity, it has become more and more a class of professional technicians rather than healers. The inability of medical societies to condemn and bar abortionists makes clear their moral dereliction. How can men condemn the torture of adults when they will not condemn the murder of unborn babes?
“It is ironic, given the injustices of humanistic law, that men declare God’s law to be “barbaric” and “primitive” and affirm the validity of modern humanistic law. Greek law was brutal towards all save the limited number of elite, and Greek society was a slave society in which the elite few regarded their will as justice. The idealization of the Greeks is by our modern elitists, who dream of a like power over the masses, i.e., over the rest of us. it is an anti-Christian dream.
“The clergy, by their indifference or hostility to God’s law, are thereby implicitly affirming humanistic law. For humanism, man is a product of evolution, not a person created in the image of God. For an evolutionary faith, man is expendable, because, as man controls and guides evolution, he must eliminate the unfit to create the new man of the future. …
“Biblical law is not popular with men even though it limits civil government to a minimal dimension; sharply limits civil taxation to a small sum; preserves the person from torture; requires self-government; and furthers freedom. It has a great fault; it indicts all men as sinners before God, something man refuses to hear.”
Hopefully, Rushdoony has made you think. And hopefully I’ve made you interested in reading his book by giving you this “appetizer.” If so you may purchase this and other books by Rousas J. Rushdoony by going to www.ChalcedonStore.com.
Are the words of Isaiah agreeable to you? “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; He will save us -” Isaiah 33:22. Is your trust in the civil state or in King Jesus? Whose word is law? The Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20 commands the Church to be “teaching them to observe all that I commanded you, …”. Are you familiar with and studying all the commands of Jesus from Genesis to Revelation? It is your royal duty to do so.
1 Comment to "Torture: Biblical Law Says “No” But Greco-Roman Law Says “Yes”"
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Hi Henry,
Excellent article, passed it along to others. Thanks for the application of God’s law here.
Calvin
Posted on July 10, 2010, by Calvin Jones